The Astria Suparak firing continues to create a breach between faculty and administrators at Syracuse University. Today's column describes how an annual faculty art exhibition was canceled due to a boycott by professors and instructors in support of Suparak. Feel free to add your impressions here, especially if you see a way past the impasse.

I had a few thoughts as I watched hundreds of art lovers Thursday night moving from The Delavan to The Red House to The Warehouse, along West Fayette Street.

I thought of how this would have been unimaginable 20 years ago, when The Warehouse was a warehouse and The Redhouse was a battered old tavern.

I thought of how incredible it would be, in this budding gallery district, if those chipped and battered railroad bridges were handed over to teams of artists as enormous examples of public art.

I thought of how much this district might achieve if this $56 million investment on the Near West Side comes to be.

And I thought of the irony of how this great burst of energy on a downtown street was potentially a form of a goodbye, touched off by the firing of a person hired with the mission of helping to generate that energy.

That is the genesis for my column today.Astria Suparak, curator of The Warehouse Gallery, has been dismissed by the university. Jeffrey Hoone, the university official who dismissed her, said he is constrained from speaking publicly of the reasons, constraints that go with any personnel decision. In that void, angry members of the arts community contend that Suparak was let go for reasons from censorship to institutional jealousy at her success.

You can read many of those arguments in this blog, much of it assembled by Joanna Spitzner, an assistant professor at SU and one of those organizing support for Suparak.

I lead off the reader response with this note from Lonnie Chu, an instructor at SU and a community activist in Eastwood.

And I look forward to hearing your thoughts, one way or another, regarding West Fayette - and what happens after Suparak.